86: The Single Most Time Conscious Salesperson with Matt Du Pont

0:08 Scott Ingram: You're listening to the Sales Success Stories podcast, where we deconstruct world-class sales performers to provide insights and strategies to help you improve. To learn more, visit us at top1.fm.

0:21 Scott Ingram: Here's your host, Scott Ingram. This episode is sponsored by the 2020 Sales Success Summit that will happen here in Austin on October 12th and 13th. For complete details, click over to top1summit.com. Today on the Sales Success Stories podcast, my guest is Matt Du Pont. Matt is the top enterprise account executive at LaunchDarkly out of San Francisco. Welcome to the show, Matt.

0:45 Matt Du Pont: Hey Scott, great to be here. Thank you.

0:46 Scott Ingram: Yeah, so I've really been looking forward to this interview. In fact, I think I've teased it in the last couple of interviews because when Matt reached out, it was with one of the most brilliant cold outreach processes and messages I've ever seen, which started with registering for the 2020 Summit, which… that's a really smart way to get my attention and get on my radar, followed by an incredibly detailed and super thoughtful pitch where he basically nailed all the items I care about the most and not only spoke to them, but provided evidence and proof. One of the most interesting parts of that note was he said, I'm the single most time-conscious salesperson you'll interact with this year. For about 3 years with over 15,000 manual entries, I've tracked how I spend time in sales to the minute, what prospect I'm focused on, what action I'm taking, and how I feel. So I'm fascinated by the idea and the results of a personal time study that is that deep. And we're for sure going to talk about that. But first, let's kick things off like we always do with the top 3 things, Matt, that you believe have contributed the most to your success.

1:57 Matt Du Pont: Thank you so much, Scott. That was a beautiful intro, and I'm glad you liked the email because I spent maybe a little bit too much time on that one. There's a couple different things I think have been really helpful in my success so far, though I would say I'm probably doing very well at LaunchDarkly in terms of attainment, but wouldn't be the top rep in terms of quota quite yet, just in case any of my colleagues are listening. I think there's a number of them doing quite well in that compared to me. The 3 areas I think really have helped me. The first one is kind of, as you alluded to, really relentlessly maximizing the commissionable dollars I earn per hour. So everyone of course wants to max commission within ethical boundaries and, you know, working sane hours and things like that, but I haven't seen too many people that track the inputs well enough to know what's actually effective. And so like you said, I've been time tracking for a couple years and I spend about maybe like 1/15th or 1/20th of my time in sales ops mode, kind of sharpening that axe, and the rest of my time executing a set of routines that I've tried to really optimize using that time tracking. So in my own scorekeeping, for example, I don't rank deals by revenue. I rank them by commission per hour. My best deal so far at LaunchDarkly wasn't flashy. It didn't stand out to management, but I spent a total of 464 minutes thinking about it, which is under a third of the time it usually takes for an enterprise deal. So I feel really good about that because I kind of made the right bets with my time. I didn't do any unnecessary events and the revenue came in. It's also been really helpful to notice when I was checking Slack too many times, because if you make yourself record something like that, then You're able to see you have certain habits that are not really helping you sell that are taking your time away. Or it's motivated me to start watching recordings of large internal meetings instead of attending live. Or I can see when I'm writing the same kinds of emails over and over and should put some serious time into making a really good template and then making that task faster in the future. So that's a little bit about that first aspect, but what I really try to focus on with this time tracking, which I know sounds a little intense, is making sure I don't spend huge amounts of time doing the wrong thing because that takes a lot longer than, you know, tracking your time.

4:21 Scott Ingram: That's amazing. I mean, and we will definitely dig, dig so much deeper into that. But let's, let's talk about your, your next 2. So obviously the first one is, is just doing the tracking and having that deep understanding of essentially what your commissionable rate is per hour and which deals are the most profitable from a time and energy spent What are the other 2 top areas?

4:44 Matt Du Pont: Sure, sure. Yeah. And that profitability is definitely quite interesting because the swing is over 20x between my, my worst deal and my best deal in terms of how much my time is worth. The second thing I really try to focus on is only taking sales jobs where I have major, quote unquote, unfair advantages. So I only want to be in roles that seem ridiculously easy for someone like me to succeed in. This guy Colonel David Hackworth had this quote, if you find yourself in a fair fight, you didn't plan your mission properly. And that's a pretty macho quote. I don't think, you know, sales needs to be all about quarterbacks and military metaphors and stuff, but I love the message because planned targets are usually set based on what the average salesperson is expected to do. And any successful company is going to have to hire at least dozens of salespeople. So the company's targets can't really expect someone to be too specialized. I view myself kind of as more of a specialist. I want clear reasons I should outperform a random salesperson of equal tenure before I take the job, and that way I'm in a good spot to beat the comp plan's expectations, even if I'm not really God's gift to salespeople or particularly great at that in any way. So there's a few ways I've done that in my present role. The first one, and most importantly, is that for about 7 years I was a software developer, so I was building software, or I was a product manager, so I was helping decide what software to build. So I have a massive advantage over a randomly selected salesperson when I'm talking to those particular buyers, especially because it's a bit uncommon to switch from those roles into a sales career. If instead I sold to like sales or to marketing or to HR, I kind of take those 7 technical years of my 10-year career and I make them a bit irrelevant, and I'm only leaning on my 3 years of sales experience. The second thing that's been important is that my social network's in the San Francisco Bay Area where I've lived and worked for 10 years, and it also helps a lot to live in the area you work so you can get easier on-site visits. So I only take roles selling to that area. And then finally, I've spent probably around 40 hours each analyzing each of my finalist companies when I was doing my last job search because I wanted to make sure that they lead their respective industries, that the market's really growing. And LaunchDarkly has more than doubled in size in the last year in terms of people and done some incredible and confidential things on the revenue and retention side of things. And they have a 2-year jump in this market for what's called feature flagging, which we can get into later, which is a development tool that consensus increasingly says every developer needs to either build themselves or buy it. So if someone looked at my role right now, they'd say, okay, he's a former software developer in the Bay Area selling to software developers in the Bay Area, and he has the best product in a growing market. That seems really easy to do well in.

7:42 Scott Ingram: Man, that is… you hit so many buttons for me there. But I think the main one was, is that, that last point, right? This idea that because I've been talking a lot about the due diligence diligence that we should be doing as sales professionals before we look at investing our essentially nearly 100% of our largest asset, right? We're going to put, yeah, the vast majority of our time into a particular role. Why wouldn't you do so much work on the front end of that to make sure it's right? Because if you do it wrong… and I've done it wrong, and it cost me months and a ton of momentum and a ton of trajectory, and it hurts so bad in so many different ways, right? Financially being one of them, but maybe not in the worst way, right? It was just sort of a psychic mismatch, and it was horrible. So that… you and I are going to be talking more because one of the assets that I want to create this year is essentially a due diligence process to help somebody figure out what are the questions that I need to ask, what do I need to do to make sure that this is the right fit for me. And I love this additional layer that you're putting on top of it to think about how else do I find an area where I have what you described, this unfair advantage where I know out of the gate I'm just going to kill it.

9:01 Matt Du Pont: Yeah, I completely, completely agree about the importance there. It's something I'm really passionate about, that diligence.

9:06 Scott Ingram: I…

9:07 Matt Du Pont: when I thought I was going to be living in kind of a lower cost of living area, there were a couple years where I was taking less time to do a traditional job to work on a job search coaching practice, mostly for product managers, less for salespeople, but Coming up with those, that diligence list, and just seeing how you kind of can dodge a bullet where you ask the right question and the answer comes back and it's this giant red flag. And it's like, wow, if I hadn't said that, then I might have gone to this job, or my client might have gone to this job, and after 3 months realized this place is sort of a disaster. I've actually had a place stop hiring salespeople because of the diligence that I've done, where I kind of showed that their model for why they were hiring salespeople did not make sense to the extent where they were overhired and they closed the rec.

9:55 Scott Ingram: Man, amazing, amazing. All right, point number 3, what do you got for me?

9:59 Matt Du Pont: I think the 3rd point for me is long-term focus. That's been very helpful to me. So every workday, part of my morning ritual includes reading this goal, which hasn't changed since my first month of working here. And frankly, it's a little bit weird to read out loud because I haven't done that before. But I say to myself that I will provide for my family and achieve autonomy, flexibility, and self-worth by reaching the 0.1% of salespeople who sell technical products to smart people. I will achieve this goal by treating every workday as part of a 10+ year journey to master my craft. So I want to be a salesperson selling to developers in the Bay Area 10 years from now, and I think if I work hard enough and I build trust with the right people, I can probably do a job like the one I have now in about 2 days per week. That becomes realistic if I can become a genuinely trusted advisor to about 200 executives in software development and then always represent the very best products and always completely tell the truth. Because the second or third time I show up after establishing that reputation, my outbound becomes incredibly easy. Now, if instead I was optimizing for promotion or wasn't prepared to quit a job to keep a San Francisco territory, I should be behaving very differently. And most of my colleagues are behaving a bit differently because they have different goals. Some of them want to get into management. Some of them aren't focused on living here long term. You know, there's nothing good or bad about me wanting to stay here, but essentially I have a perfect fit with my buyer and geography. And so that means it's worth it for me to put in the extra effort or build the relationship in a way that doesn't pay off on this deal. In dozens of little ways per week. And so even though that's a long-term focus, I think the level of commitment kind of I can bring to these buyers enhances my short-term results because any little thing I get helps me so far from now that it just wouldn't rationally be worth it for some of my colleagues who are going to be in a different territory next year to… or managing people next year to be as focused on making those people happy over the long term.

12:02 Scott Ingram: Wow. I, you know, I always think of myself as a rather probably way above average in terms of intentionality. Your, your intentionality is next level. And it reminds me of a story that I heard real interestingly, where you can look at this in a different way, right? I heard this story about a very solid top-performing rep, but his model was he had a relationship with the executives at a premier account that he had developed early in his career in sales. And essentially his model was, was the reverse of what most people do, right? Most people work for one company, they sell to lots of different companies. This guy essentially works for his client and would go and take a sales role with the company that had the next best solution that he knew they were going to need.

12:51 Matt Du Pont: I absolutely love that.

12:52 Scott Ingram: Yeah. And just do a massive transformational deal with them. Right. And he'd be able to get it done really fast. Because he had all of the executive relationships. He knew what the trajectory of the business was and what they needed and then would just change jobs every, you know, however long it took. Sometimes it was a year, sometimes it was 18 months, you know, and the company got a ton of value, right? They got this incredible marquee client. This guy got a massive commission and then just moved on and would go and do it again and again. I've not heard of anybody else Really thinking about it that way. And it sounds like you've got that kind of a mix and that, that long-term focus. And the other thing I know we're going to come back to, you talked about the 2-day-a-week model. I know you've been at a place where you were working 3.5 days a week. So we'll get there, but let's, let's do just kind of the higher-level context for now and talk about your current role. Tell us about LaunchDarkly and feature flagging and all that good stuff.

13:51 Matt Du Pont: Sure. So what LaunchDarkly does, it lets companies that are making software control exactly which people using that software have what kind of experiences. So before LaunchDarkly, or the general concept is called feature flagging, software teams who are changing their app would do tons and tons of testing. They push the big red button and then they hope nothing bad happens because it generally affects all their users. So any of your favorite sales tools like Gong or Chorus or something like that, if they're ever down, it usually means someone made a mistake here. They made a change and then that change turns out not to work. LaunchDarkly makes something called feature flagging easy. So you put this flag on a feature and you send that new risky change to maybe just 10 people. And then if that works, 1% of the users and then 50%, and then only at the end, your very sensitive enterprise customers who are very picky about everything working. And then if anything goes wrong, you just hit a button and the old working version is back under a second. So it sort of makes it safer to make changes in these really, really, really complex software systems that, you know, every company at this point is running to have an online presence. And I represent LaunchDarkly to companies in the city of San Francisco with between 250 and 5,000 employees. So my primary buyers are software development teams and secondarily product managers, and I held the first role there for about 2 years and the latter for about 5. It's a great territory since companies have money and are growing fast, but a tough one because many of the sales strategies and product features that are most effective for the rest of the country don't work well with the sorts of advanced programming teams you find in San Francisco or New York City. So many of my colleagues are explaining the exciting new idea of feature flagging Well, I'm trying to get a lot of people who built their own system to do it several years ago to make a switch.

15:42 Scott Ingram: Fascinating. Fascinating. Fascinating. So before we talk about Matt's results, let me tell you just a bit more about the Sales Success Summit. This is our 3rd annual event built for this Sales Success Community. It's happening here in Austin on October 12th and 13th. And this event is different from every other sales conference out there because it exclusively features the top performing sales professionals you've heard here on this podcast. And my rule for guests on this show is that they have to be active quota-carrying individual contributors who are either the outright number one top seller in their organization or at least in the top 1% of performers on a very large team. You won't find any gurus or quote unquote sales experts on the stage at the event, only real practitioners like Matt, who's already committed to being there. It's an intimate experience with a max of just under 200 participants where we all get an opportunity to learn from each other. I could go on, but the details are available for you at top1summit.com. And the sooner you register, the better your price as tickets increase $50 per month until they're sold out. Again, all the details are there for you at top1summit.com. All right, Matt, let's, let's talk about your results and let's try and do this 2 ways if you're okay with it. I'd like to talk about it in percentage terms, but maybe you can give us some, some visibility into your, your commissionable rate per hour?

17:06 Matt Du Pont: Sure. So I guess we'll start with the percentage terms. So I started at LaunchDarkly in mid-April of 2019. Takes a bit of time to get ramped up with a sale this complex, but I had a roughly 250% Q3, which led the company. And I'm on track for 150% attainment for the year. I hope to lead in attainment, though I'm nowhere near the running for overall dollar amount versus the people that had a full year and are fully ramped. So maybe we'll see if I can get there in 2020. And I'm not authorized to discuss kind of specific comp or revenue, but we do kind of mostly high 5, low 6-figure deals, and the OTE is pretty standard for a Bay Area Series C-backed company. In terms of the commissionable time per hour, that's gone from… on one of my… so the low score is a little under $20 an hour, So it would have been more effective had I taken a brief hiatus and gone and worked at a restaurant or something and just come back instead of doing that deal. Those are the ones where you… I learned the most lessons on those. It's like, I'm never doing X, Y, and Z again. And then highest was a little north of $600, but that's unusually efficient.

18:19 Scott Ingram: Yeah. So what's the biggest learnings on the minimum wage jobs or the minimum wage deals?

18:25 Matt Du Pont: Yeah, I think once I… if I totally crack that, I may have to become one of those gurus. But if… I think usually you're able to point to a pretty clear point in time when you should have pushed harder in terms of qualification. I think that's kind of one thing for me is getting too far in and then being like, I really should have killed this deal in step 3 because I didn't know there's gonna be steps 5 through 87. And then The other one is I've made the mistake over and over, even though I track this pretty well, of, oh, this deal is kind of small and not that interesting, but sort of like pot odds in poker, like I only need to put in, you know, another hour and then I'll get it over the finish line. And then I say that to myself about 8 times as their procurement department leads me on a merry chase. And, you know, I should have recognized kind of early on that just because I only see 1 or 2 steps left given the track record of my time with this company, probably means there's a bunch of hidden steps I haven't detected yet.

19:22 Scott Ingram: Got it. So it's really like that idea of sunk cost, right? You're like, well, I'm in this far and it's only a little bit further before I'm finished that kind of comes back to bite you, right?

19:32 Matt Du Pont: I think that's definitely a big part of it on some of those ones. It's also not necessarily always a bad thing. Like some of the deals I'm excited about are pretty low on the list because I've overinvested to get a pilot in place. That's definitely one flaw in tracking it this way is that some of the larger deals will be, you know, very low on the list for the land, and then the numbers look better when you expand since the expansion is less effort and much more lucrative.

19:56 Scott Ingram: Yep.

19:56 Matt Du Pont: But it's just, it's, it's a good way. A lot of this stuff isn't about, you know, I come to this miraculous semi-academic conclusion and, you know, my practice is better from then on. It's that, you know, forcing myself to write this stuff down every time I take the time Where instead of writing an email in 5 minutes, I overthink it, it takes 18, or I just socialized with my coworker for like 43 minutes and I have to admit that to myself, or whatever it is. Like that accountability over the course of the day or over the course of the week when I look back at that deal has probably been more powerful for me than any, you know, any of the insights. The insights have been good, but the real thing is just having to look at the end of the day and be like, this is exactly how you spent your time. You can't hide it from yourself.

20:39 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Now, are you only tracking your personal or professional time, as it were, or are you tracking everything?

20:46 Matt Du Pont: I don't aspire to be the kind of person that tracks every minute of every day. I think that would be a little bit… I think that would be… I'd be very, very good at sales and very, very bad at life.

20:56 Scott Ingram: Well, damn, because I was planning to ask if you were tracking… let's see, I know you're married and you've got a kid, so, you know, intimacy levels or how long your arguments were. But I guess that's not available data.

21:09 Matt Du Pont: I'd be, I'd be lying if I said I hadn't thought about some of this stuff, but I kind of made a choice a while ago to try not to be so deliberate about the rest of my life. So I try to, because part of why I got into sales in the first place is it's so clean. There's just, there's one number, and if you kind of follow the rules and the number's high enough, then you're doing a good job. And that, for someone that likes this sort of optimization and maximization like me, is very appealing. Life is not that simple, and so I don't try to treat it with the same lens anymore.

21:41 Scott Ingram: Got it. Anymore. So, so there was a time that you were trying this?

21:44 Matt Du Pont: Well, you know, I was… I'd say like kind of more much when I was much, much younger, I tried to take some approaches like this to the rest of, the rest of my life, but I was not in a relationship, and that was probably one of the reasons why.

21:56 Scott Ingram: So gotcha. Nice. So let's do just a little bit more contextualizing and just walk us through your origin story and, and how you ultimately made the transition to sales and why.

22:09 Matt Du Pont: Sure, sure. So I grew up outside Philadelphia, went to high school in the city, kind of was really, really focused on academics and not enough on socialization in high school. But I got really into speech and debate sort of by accident, where I put in a lot of time there and kind of got some good results. And that made me comfortable with some of the interactions that I would later do in sales. When I went to college, I was a… I ended up as a computer science major, which turned out to be a good career move. But for me, it was really just that was the subject where now you kind of have to work on stuff for hours and hours every week. That was the one where when I got to the end of it, I'd still feel pretty interested. So I didn't really… I tried a few jobs, like I wanted to be like a computer science researcher or a lobbyist in Washington, D.C., and I kind of tried those both for a summer and was really bad at both of them. So I ended up doing management consulting and moving to San Francisco kind of on a whim. I never really intended to stay on the West Coast, but I kind of got out there because the city was interesting and stayed because tech was interesting, and then met my wife and fell in love, and her family's out there. But when I was in San Francisco, management consulting was kind of… it was literally depressing in a clinical sense. You're traveling 4 days a week to these other cities where you're doing very interesting work, but it sort of completely eats your life and you spend very little time in the city you're actually from, like working on, you know, meeting people and developing relationships and having good friends, which is a lot of what I wanted to do when I got out of college. So I made the jump over to product management, which is a role in software technology companies where you're kind of helping direct what gets built and manage the day-to-day work of a software team. But that sort of sounds like it has more authority than it actually does. It's kind of a lot of soft power, but you're never, you're not really in charge of anyone. So you have to work a lot on your influence skills and showing people why something's important to them, which turned out to be really important for sales. And then I kind of bounced between product management and starting companies, but never really had something where I was really excited about doing that for another 10 or 15 years. It was fine. I wasn't upset with my life, but it wasn't… I kept feeling like there was something more that I would like in work and looking more and more at sales as something that seemed like it'd be pretty fun. And eventually kind of stepped back and did a big analysis on what actually made me happy in my professional life and decided to give sales a shot. And had a really strange negotiation where I went from the senior-most product manager to the most junior salesperson at the same company, which involved like losing 2/3 of my salary and is generally a really uncommon transition. There's very few product managers that become salespeople, but I absolutely loved it. It was the happiest I'd been professionally. I worked at that company Poll Everywhere for a while. They make, if you've ever done something at a conference where you vote on your phone, it shows up live. They make software like that. And that's a great company to work for, but it's sort of compensation constrained because there's a bit of a smaller deal size. And also HR wasn't really my favorite buyer, nothing against them, but it wasn't the kind of like people I'd want to be like really hanging out with and building my life on for 20 years. So once my wife and I figured out we were probably going to live in a high cost of living area, I moved to launch Darkly since the buyer was a better fit. The deal size kind of supports a better income, and I've really liked this company for 5 or 6 years because I met the founder a long time ago.

25:57 Scott Ingram: That's awesome. Is there anything that you would have done differently knowing what you know now at the beginning of your career? And if you could start over, would you take the same journey? Would you make deviations? What would you do?

26:09 Matt Du Pont: I think there's a couple of things, you know, waving aside the usual philosophical, like, if you like yourself, don't change your past thing. I think there's a couple things I could have done differently. Like, one is I think a lot of, a lot of my career may have developed much faster if I hadn't been running too much towards prestige, sometimes due to just a lack of other goals, like kind of coming to the end of college and not knowing what to do with my life. And so management consulting kind of comes on there and does all this really intense recruiting where it's really hard to get in. The compensation's good. They make it very appealing in a number of ways, which they sort of have to do because the fundamentals of the job are, you know, working all the time for like large, like large companies you haven't heard of. So I think in that, and then kind of staying in product a little too long because you're not sort of supposed to take your CS degree and your, you know, promising past in technology and then go into sales. Like there's a, there's a status gap between being a developer or PM and being a salesperson, which I struggled with. And once I started focusing more on what made me happy versus what I felt like I was supposed to do or what would give me the most credibility with my peers, then I've been a lot happier professionally. But that has been a bit of a difficult jump for me because I moved from a profession that kind of looks down on sales in many ways to being a salesperson. Which I like a lot, but is a bit stigmatized.

27:40 Scott Ingram: Sure, sure, sure, sure. Although I would think that the credibility that you have with your buyer, given you've sat in their seat, is super unique to you. Because to your point, I can name one person who's gone from product into sales, and I'm talking to him.

27:56 Matt Du Pont: Yeah, I think the credibility, it's definitely something where it works very well in the sales itself. It makes my job so much easier, and I'm very, very thankful that I had this career. Like, if I was giving advice to somebody that was going to be selling for a long time. It would be, you know, if you're… it might be good if you like a… if you can find a buyer to specialize in, like, even think about doing that job for a year or 2 because it'll pay off for a long time, which is not something I did on purpose by any means, just something I stumbled into that's been very helpful for me.

28:24 Scott Ingram: Yeah. So, I mean, the show's called Sales Success Stories. I feel like we should talk about a story of a successful sale you've had and something you learned from it. You've got a good one?

28:34 Matt Du Pont: Yeah. So when I was at Poll Everywhere, we hit a point about a year into me selling there where I was doing, I was doing very well. A lot of that was due to the fact that I had helped build the product. So, you know, it's nice to have the credibility of having held a job role before, but when you're talking to someone and you were one of the primary people for why the product was built the way it was, that's about the most credibility I'm ever going to have in a role. And that, that showed up pretty well in the results. And I think traditionally what you try to do in that situation is get some sort of more compensation. You get a raise, you get a promotion, you get a nice title or something like that. But I was interested in trying to start a business around job search coaching. And also more generally, I wanted to see if I could challenge the assumption of like, we all kind of have to work 5 days a week, which is something that salespeople have been regularly challenging for a long time, but it was kind of new to me. And so we set a kind of set of performance targets for if I could exceed the average of the kind of previous top rep for a certain amount of time in a row, then I would get to reduce the hours that I'm responsible to be working as long as I kind of kept up a good amount of performance. And I've never had a goal that motivating. It's… I've had like spiffs before, but when the spiff is basically work a day and a half less per week, that was really, really exciting to me. And so partially, I think, through a lot of hard work and partially because I think the challenge wasn't as hard as maybe they thought it was, just quantifiably, I was able to hit that pretty early on. And the, the thing that was interesting to me is that I really didn't sell that much less when I was working 3.5 days a week, because what I kind of realized is that there's certain, you know, really nice… there's a few deals you have going that are kind of really hot, and you're always going to respond to those really quickly. And then a lot of the rest of the week is filled up with you know, what are you doing because you don't have those really good deals? And so yes, you're gonna prospect and you're gonna get a few more of them, but you know, your first day a week in sales where you're just responding to those really intense deals is probably as effective as your next 2, as effective as like 5 more. I don't know the numbers at all, but I was kind of surprised and motivated by how working 5 days a week didn't really affect my numbers too hard. And I'm really curious I'd love to learn from your other guests or anything you have guidance on that, but I'm curious if other people have had a similar experience there because I suspect it's probably true across a number of companies.

31:25 Scott Ingram: Yeah. I mean, that again, fascinating from so many levels. I mean, it sounds like you basically ran the Tim Ferriss 4-Hour Workweek negotiation around your time, which in that book, and it's been a long time since I've read it, but it was really about more location independence than it was the time independence that, that you did. But, you know, the series of conversations I've, I've had here leading up to your episode, if they indeed stay in the order in which I recorded them, which may or may not happen depending on PR approvals that I need to work through. But I think we're good. I've got a good amount of time. I mean, the one that I know will be out before this is the conversation I had with Brandon Fluharty. And Brandon, 7-figure earner, right? Massive SaaS sales success, and less about the time tracking. Although interestingly, he did talk a lot about understanding your hourly rate, right? He had a much simpler formula than 15,000 data points. But the net of that is, and where we spent a lot of our conversation, is just in this idea of focus and prioritization. And you can… my process, I mean, the way that I work, and people are often just blown away by the fact that in addition to hosting 2 podcasts, well, technically 3 podcasts, and writing books and hosting a summit and all this other stuff, I also carry a $3 million number. And at the end of the day, it is, it's the focus and the priorities. And if you do that right, I feel like when I'm in that kind of zone, in that kind of mode, especially with the time that I get up in the morning, I've gotten more done in a day by 10:00 AM than most people accomplish in 1 or 2 days. Yeah.

33:11 Matt Du Pont: And I think that's… it's very, very powerful to see people that are doing that. And I don't even think it's a knock against the sort of average person in many ways, because we're not really taught to think in this way very much. You kind of have to stumble across it at some point. But it is sort of both inspiring and kind of terrifying how much better you can get work done than sort of the, the quote unquote usual way that you'd probably want to do it the first time you step into a job.

33:37 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Well, and I think, I think there's a fair amount of data out there that speaks to just how wasteful an 80-hour workweek is. You know, you're, you're not getting much more done than somebody that's working 40 hours. I mean, the diminishing returns are so bad that it's, it's just not worth it. You know, it makes so much more sense to be more focused. And yeah, why do we work a 5-day workweek? I mean, nobody's asking these questions and really evaluating this. I mean, there's, there's other examples recently that, that I've seen where, you know, yeah, a 4-day workweek is more productive. And even if they're not adding the hours, right? Even if it's not, we're cramming 40 hours into 4 days instead of 5, and it's just, nope, we just work Monday through Thursday. You know, I think some of it's just the motivation and the life balance, like the mindset that creates of like, when I'm in work, I'm actually freaking working instead of all the other stuff that we do.

34:32 Matt Du Pont: Yeah. And I think both you and I do not strive to be managers. Like we're very excited by the individual contributor role. And that means that things like maybe FaceTime or politicking in meetings or things like that are less important to us. Whereas you're probably not going to be too disruptive on the workweek stuff. If your real goal is to get promoted into the management and you kind of need to be approved by people.

34:57 Scott Ingram: Yeah, I think that's a totally fair, a totally fair point. So you've accomplished a lot, right? You've had a lot of success working, working a lot less time than a lot of other people. What are you most proud of from an accomplishment perspective?

35:09 Matt Du Pont: So I don't have… I guess a lot of that is pretty forward-looking for me. And so I know, I kind of know where I'm trying to go. But I don't know if there's anything that really stands out to me in terms of I've done this particular thing in sales and, you know, that thing is amazing. Because I've only really been doing this for 3 years and I feel like there's kind of a long way to go. What I'm going to be really proud of is kind of when I meet that goal that I set as kind of during my… during that morning ritual of really achieving a huge amount of success in this notion of technical sales. And I see that as kind of, in any job, there's kind of 2 moves you can make. Like, I could work after I'm at LaunchDarkly for a couple years, if things go well, I could kind of level up again and work for a company with a higher OTE, a more complex sale, or I can try to do what I did at Poll Everywhere. And I can work at a company of roughly equivalent status and reduced to 3 or 4 days a week. Like, the hope would be if I can do a good enough job at LaunchDarkly, I can go to another company in a similar role and say, hey, I have done really well in a role like this in the past, but I'm only going to work here with these constraints. Does that sound good to you? And I think I can probably find someone to take me up on that offer. So what I'll be really proud of is when I can support a family in the Bay Area and I don't need to work 5 days a week, even if I choose to because it's fun or because I want to. That's what I'm shooting for. And I think I'm not going to be super, super proud of my sales career until I get there.

36:44 Scott Ingram: Yeah, that's, that's great. And, you know, as you told the first 3.5-day story, I was thinking, man, everybody wins in that situation, right? There's no downside for the company because you're producing at the best producer level. So how does that… doesn't hurt them at all. And you get this giant win in that you get a day and a half of your life back every single week.

37:06 Matt Du Pont: Yeah, and I think the great thing for the company in that situation is retention. So it's that in that case, you know, if you're kind of in a position where they're willing to offer you that, which is a position I was in the past and I don't think I am yet presently at with LaunchDarkly, that means that hopefully they're kind of holding on to someone. They're either paying less for someone that they would have to pay a lot for, or they're getting someone to work there who otherwise would go elsewhere. And I think that could be a really nice alternative to your top reps sort of graduating and going somewhere else, which is probably not a problem if your company's growing super fast and you have a lot of exciting roles to go into. But for more like bootstrap companies or companies that aren't growing at a super high rate, that might be a nice way to hold on to their best people.

37:52 Scott Ingram: Yeah, well, and it's, man, just a fascinating incentive. I mean, just thinking about how hard it drove you You know, we're, we're not very creative in this space, right? It's okay, more money or there's a trip. You know, no, nobody's ever offered, you know what, if you, if you can do X and then maintain that pace or, you know, 90% of that pace, 85% of that pace, we'll reduce your working hours by 20% or, or your working days. I mean, damn. It's a fascinating thought experiment and, and maybe some people will try it. Because what's, what's the downside risk?

38:28 Matt Du Pont: Yeah, exactly. And like, unlike other jobs where it's pretty easy, there's always gonna be someone that pays more, right? They might have a worse culture, they might have a lot of things wrong, but when you're… unless you're like Google or Facebook, you're not going to win just by throwing money at the problem usually. So especially if you can offer a benefit like that where it's so uncommon, it basically meant I couldn't move because how do you go in, you know, how do you go into a first-round interview and be like, hey, I need, you know, I need to work much less per week, especially in a sales role where everyone just wants it to be, you know, cogs in a wheel, sort of everyone's got the same target, everyone works the same thing. Like it's all forecasted and stamped out. Very hard for a company to adapt once they have above a certain number of reps. Yeah.

39:11 Scott Ingram: So what do you find to be the biggest challenge in your sales roles or that you struggle with the most?

39:19 Matt Du Pont: So the honest answer to this is I struggle a lot with internal process. When I was a product manager, your role there is kind of this poorly defined sweeper. And I say poorly defined in a good way. It's not you do X, Y, and Z, and then if something else outside that range happens, you say that's not my job and you move on. You're kind of just ultimately responsible for the product being good. And so that means if there's something in support where there's customers that are getting a bad experience, or There's a bad handoff between, you know, marketing, getting new leads and people getting onboarded to the product or whatever the problem is, you try to go fix it if you think it's influential for the company. And now I've moved to a role where you're kind of supposed to stay in your lane and just hit your number. And especially at a company like LaunchDarkly, which is excellent, but growing very rapidly with a lot of the growing pains in terms of process that that would entail. I have this strong impulse to try and fix a lot of the things that I see that are just clearly not the way that people would design them if they had thought about them a bit first. Like, everyone made sensible choices, but, you know, then 2 departments kind of bump into each other in a way that's a bit unfortunate. And it's been very tough for me to kind of just swallow that and not try to spend all my time kind of being in that sales ops mode, which I really like, and just fixing the process and having to say, okay, this is a process that doesn't make a ton of sense. I'm going to be doing it 50 times in the next month. It's going to cost me a lot of time and I have no alternatives. So I'm just going to go ahead and do that instead of trying to fix everything, complain about it, because otherwise I wouldn't make too many sales. I know it sounds minor, but it's kind of the thing where it's like getting bit by a mosquito. You know, every, every couple hours or something, and you just want it to go away so you can focus a little bit.

41:13 Scott Ingram: Well, and you've got the data to back it up. I mean, I wonder if there's not sort of a mid-range solution where you at least, you know, what, what's not helpful to leadership is just complaining. But if you've got… look, here's, here's what I think. If you've got a proposed answer that maybe somebody else can go execute, does that better solve the problem and add value to the organization?

41:35 Matt Du Pont: Yeah, I think I certainly, I would say I'm pretty comfortable making the claim that I, you know, ask for and get more changes than any other rep probably. And that's not because of any status I have. It's just like you said, it's because I'm usually coming at it with a bit of a solution. I just don't think that's necessarily a great quality for a sales rep because my entire management chain pretty much wants me to sell. And so I think it's, it's good to have some reps that are proactive in changing process, and I'm certainly not the only one. But for everything that I do submit that does go well, you know, there's, there's, there's 4 other things where I'm just kind of sitting on that and shutting it down. So I think I'm already kind of a bit extreme in that direction, and left to my own devices, I'd probably be way more extreme. But that wouldn't really help me hit my number. It wouldn't help me, you know, my family. And so I need to kind of just let some of that stuff go rather than essentially be a manager and spend most of my day trying to improve the process for the reps. Yeah, makes sense.

42:38 Scott Ingram: All right, so let's start to peel this onion and first just talk through your blow-by-blow day in the life. And I know you've listened to the show, so you kind of know the, know the drill. So alarm goes off, what time? And give us the, give us the step-by-step and, and how you're kind of structuring the typical day. Sure.

42:56 Matt Du Pont: And I guess just let me know if this gets a little too detailed because I have…

43:01 Scott Ingram: Do you not know this show? There's almost no such thing as too detailed. Although I guess, yeah, you've got a lot. Yeah, let's, let's go. Let's do this.

43:08 Matt Du Pont: Great. So my alarm time floats around a lot. My wife is a pediatric dental resident. So for example, she's been on an anesthesia rotation for the last couple of weeks. So she gets up at 5 in the morning, so I get up at 5 in the morning. Other times it might be as late as like 8 or something. So I kind of flex the time that I wake up, but my morning is pretty set. So I have, I have about a 45-minute to an hour commute, and I have a series of things that I try to do before I pretty much wake up, get dressed, and leave because my wife is not very awake in the morning. So I'd rather kind of get to spend a lot more time with her in the afternoon. And we're actually expecting, so we have a… our first kid is coming in about 2 months. So this is all gonna get kind of violently upended very shortly in a way I'm excited for. So when I… the first thing I do is I have like a set of rituals I run when I usually, when I'm kind of get a seat on the train or just get a little bit of time to myself. So first, it's very tactical. I check any obligations that I have and basically make sure my calendar is arranged correctly for the day. In case I didn't do that last night. So that'll be triaging emails and making sure that anything that needs to get responded to right away is in the right category. I split my email into respond within a few hours, a business day, a week, a month, or just archiving it. So I'll just kind of put those all in the right categories and make sure I start thinking about the few hours email. I'll set a time that fits for my meetings that day for when I'm going to do kind of my ending ritual. A time during the day to do personal work. So things like making doctor's appointments or errands or something like that. I find I just don't do it if I don't set a block of time during business hours. So I try to do that every weekday. And then I make sure all my calendared meetings have a room, the appropriate call checklist set up in Notes document, that I've either prepped the call or that I put it on a list of things to prep and that they have a follow-up task in Salesforce. So that's kind of the tactical bit. Then I switch over to kind of getting my mind in order. So I have a spreadsheet that just kind of gives me, tries to take me to like a high-level perspective. This is kind of interesting because I found that if I read the same kind of goals or motivation every day, I start to sort of, especially early in the morning, I kind of mentally skip over it more than I'd like. So it's a spreadsheet that uses a bit of randomness. And so some days it'll tell me to really focus on curiosity, and other days it'll tell me to work on automation or using leverage. It'll put up a few quotes that I find inspirational, but it'll draw those again randomly from kind of a bank of quotes with the goal that every morning there's a little bit of surprise in what I see in there, and it's different on Monday and Tuesday, so I pay a bit more attention. Any kind of… like, there's a bunch more in the morning stuff. I just want to make sure if there's any questions. Anything you want to clarify on that or should I keep going?

46:07 Scott Ingram: No, keep going. I'm fascinated by the idea though of, because I know folks that have done kind of the morning affirmation type of process and things like that. And yeah, I mean, the way you're tackling it is again fascinating because at some point that sort of gets stale and it's not really absorbing. It becomes just sort of rote. And does it really make the impact versus, hey, let me surprise myself a little bit and find ways to keep this fresh but still have the same impact and drive the same behaviors.

46:34 Matt Du Pont: And so, yeah, there's some things that stay constant in that, like making sure I think that sleep and food and exercise matter a lot to my mental state. But, you know, some days it'll be like, how do I be a better husband? Other days it'll be a better friend. Soon it's gonna be a better father, which is, you know, an interesting one to add.

46:50 Scott Ingram: We're gonna have to, so let me do a call out here because for folks, if you guys are digging this conversation, I mean, I am, but maybe it's just because like I'm a sales nerd at the same level that Matt is, but I would love to circle back on this and do a round 2 in, I don't know, a year, year and a half, once you're dealing with the realities of a young family, because it is hard, it is a challenge, and it's one that it's not universal, but lots of people experience and have to go through. And I'd love to hear how you're sort of applying this technique and the way that you're strategizing and then incorporating a certainly challenging set of new inputs.

47:34 Matt Du Pont: Yeah, I think that would definitely be fun for me to loop back on just to see. I'll be like, wow, I did not sound nearly this tired a year ago, but we'll see how that all goes. So there's kind of that piece of it. Then I go over to what are my work goals? So I read out kind of what are, what are some of the frames I look at in terms of having that 10-year focus? The other thing I try to look at is what do I view as my current strengths sorted by how sort of unlikely they are to find in a salesperson. Because I think that in order to become really excellent, it's not that I'm gonna be better than people I sell alongside at the things they're good at. Like, there are people I work with who are just fantastic negotiators or amazing at building rapport or all these other things where I can, I can walk that path, but they've been specializing in that for 10 or 15 years and I haven't. So I can learn from them, but I'm not gonna exceed them. So I want to find the strengths that I have, like for example, being a PM in sales world or just thinking systematically or curiosity or other areas where I rate myself highly and think about those every day because I want to specialize in an approach to sales that takes those strengths that I've built up over years or decades and finds a way to use them, not try to be what someone else's idea of a good salesperson is because they're probably way better at that than me. So that's kind of the morning stuff. I'll then also go over my goals that I set in my weekly retro and try to see if I can introduce those to my daily goals. Then I'll pick the 3 most important things to do today. I'll send those… right now it's my BDR. I always have someone where I send them goals every day, they send me goals every day as an accountability mechanism. So my BDR Kevin and I have been exchanging those, and those have been really helpful for both of us. And then finally I'll pick kind of a mental frame that I try to keep in mind that day. So this I kind of pick every day and I vary it up again to keep myself interested. So some of those might be, be persistent, you know, be really patient and pleasant even though you're really tired today, or don't worry too much about doing the exact right work in the right order, just focus on getting a lot done, or really focus on improvement today, take extra time after your calls, like whatever, whatever that goal is. I just like to switch it up so I have something that I'm holding in my mind to improve on that day.

49:55 Scott Ingram: And that's not one that's being randomly selected for you. That, that I imagine is a little bit more intentional just given the what's going on and where you're at and where you need to focus.

50:05 Matt Du Pont: Yeah, exactly. And so a lot of times that's kind of based on how I'm feeling that morning. A lot of the stuff, if I finish early, I'll do the day prior. But the thing I just brought up is more meant to be like, what excites me today? Or what's, you know, do I see some sort of weakness in myself today? Like I'm tired or I'm angry or something. And how do I course correct against that? So that's kind of what I do before I start work. It's a relatively long list, but I've gotten pretty good at whipping through it in 10 or 15 minutes. And I think it gets me in the right headspace and you can't really do too much on the train anyway. So once those are in place, then I have kind of my workflow of how I go through things in sales. And this will be interrupted by calls and meetings and things like that. But essentially this is a list of what I should do if I have free time. So first I'll just prep any meetings I have today that I haven't prepped yet. If I have too much here, then I didn't do my job well enough yesterday because it's kind of a waste to take like the best sales hours and sort of my best brain and prep most meetings. And then I have a couple different categories of email that I outlined, like the ones I really want to make sure not just that I respond to the ones within a few business hours and a few business hours, but also that if it's respond within a week, I don't, you know, run off and do that because it feels good instead of doing something like, hey, I really need to sit down and plan this account that could be really large instead of, you know, chasing that $5,000 deal. So I'll have a set of tasks in Salesforce. The 2 main designators that I use are high priority, which means I really want to get this done before I leave work today, and simple. So high priority, I'll just use the kind of priority flag in Salesforce. Simple, I'll just put a dot in front of it, so just like a period, which has been a little tactic that you can use even if, you know, it's not officially supported by your sales ops team. You can just search for the first character if you want to split tasks into categories. And the goal there is this might not be the most impactful thing, But it's so easy to do. It's just sending a simple follow-up or, you know, turning on someone's account on a certain day that it'd be a waste. You know, I can move some deals forward and they all take under 3 minutes. So I should make sure to do my simple tasks every day. And then I've just got a bunch of an order of things. Like I'll do the emails in a few hours and I'll do the high priority tasks. Then I'll send reminders to people for conversations in 2 business days. Then I'll do the simple tasks and it sort of just goes. Down the list, and I never really get to the bottom of the list, but the whole goal is that when I feel like, hey, I'm not really spending my time in the best way, just come back to this list and do the next thing on the list if it's not done yet.

52:40 Scott Ingram: Awesome. I'll call out here that we are going to be assembling maybe the most resource-rich set of show notes just because Matt has so much great content and resources and essentially tools that he uses for himself. And there'll essentially be 2 tiers. So if you go to top1.fm/matt-du-pont or forward slash whatever this episode number is, that's the easiest way to get there. And we'll have a lot of public stuff. And then I'm going to, I'm going to create a layer that's just one level deeper where you need to be on the listener list to get to it. So there'll be just a real quick form for you to drop your, your name and email address in there. Don't worry, the detail doesn't get shared. You just go onto the weekly update list. And we're gonna put some of the deeper stuff. One of those things, so I know we're, we're gonna share kind of your habit checklist and, and some of these other things that matter, your, your daily checklist. If you're okay with it, I'd also like to share your intro pitch email, cuz I, I just, I, I thought it was, it was assembled. The structure was, was borderline brilliant.

53:42 Matt Du Pont: Oh, that's very nice of you to say. Yeah, I'm, I'm definitely open to that being shared. I'll just, we'll take a quick look at it, but I'm sure once we kind of tighten that up a little bit, then we can send that out to the audience. I don't think… I think with both the systems and that email, it's not anything where it's rocket science. It's just kind of taking a little bit of time more than, more than some people do to think about it and just see what works for you and play with it. So hopefully the message from a lot of this is not so much that this is the right system or anything like that, because I think that would be really arrogant for me to assume, especially so early in my career, but more just that If you spend time really thinking about what works for you and what doesn't, and just start writing things down and, you know, make sure you make yourself follow the instructions, and hopefully you can find a process that doesn't look anything like this but works really well for your sale and your client.

54:33 Scott Ingram: Yeah, that's it right there. I mean, that was, that was really the, the main point from my productivity presentation at the summit last year is, look, I'm gonna, I'm gonna give you a detailed look into my own process, and hopefully that inspires some ideas. But at the end of the day, this is not direct copy and paste, right? This is a lot of finding your own way. And hopefully some of these resources serve as a good inspiration and where you can kind of steal elements and work those into your own process that you're developing over time. All right. So with that little sidebar out of the way, Matt, let's keep talking just about the way that you're continuing to work through that day and what happens beyond kind of the checklist process that you're you're executing through.

55:18 Matt Du Pont: Sure. So that's, that's kind of what I'll do with the free time that I have. But a lot of my… a lot of the, a lot of the day is going to be centered around some sort of live client interaction. And especially because I think I have a demographic that's a little bit less likely to get on the phone without a really clear reason, we need to make those count really well because most developers, especially in San Francisco, don't have like a way of calling into a switchboard and getting connected to them. A number of them are kind of so opposed to cold calls that it's actually counterproductive to be calling into organizations because it'll just cause resentment, the fact that you're reaching out like that. And so when you do have a call with these, with a software developer, it's often really important to make sure that call is so valuable to them that they're excited to speak with you again in the future so that you can help them progress from early ideation to actually kicking the tires on the product to a more formal POC to a deal. And so I keep notes about companies in a pretty set format. And I'll kind of put out a call checklist before every… any examples of when I actually talk with people. I don't know if it would be interesting to go through that, like what that checklist is, if that would be interesting, but I don't want to like throw too many checklists if that's not sort of the theme of this episode.

56:53 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Why don't we… let's just create like a little toolkit. So we'll, we'll create the detail on some of these checklists. So obviously Matt's going to anonymize these, these things and not make them Too proprietary, I suppose, and we'll assemble some of the detail there. And Matt, just another sidebar here because you've mentioned it twice, and I want to make sure that we talk about it. So you've you've talked about how this particular persona, right? Like the the people that you're calling on are, I think it's fair to say, essentially sales averse, right? They're they're not going to appreciate a good sales effort the way another seller or even a marketer or other parts of the organization might appreciate. So how do you react to that? Like, what does your prospecting look like? Because obviously you have to take a really different approach.

57:47 Matt Du Pont: Yeah, so it's definitely one of those… I agree, it's a different situation. And there's a couple things that we try to do differently in prospecting here. One is that you have to be really looking for indications of interest and being very persistent about those. So trying to find anyone that's, you know, trialed the product or read literature, gone to an event or something, like really mining those leads out in detail, perhaps spending a little bit more time on that before going into totally cold prospecting than you might do in other industries. The second thing is that I think it's really important to find situations in which you can show that you understand a problem that they have, because arguably, you know, venture capital-backed San Francisco companies may be receiving like higher volumes of email and reach out than almost any other kind of roles below the C-level at US companies. There's just so many people trying to sell to these folks where, and I'm sure that's true of CEOs the world over, but I think just in terms of targeting an average developer or engineering manager, it's quite crowded. And so that'll be things like going to meetups or other live events where it wouldn't necessarily be about your product, but it's more that the right kind of people are in the room. And then a lot of what I try to focus on is really showing myself as a peer and as someone that has been in their shoes before in whatever way I can, even if it's totally unrelated to my product, just so that I can transfer my credibility level hopefully from the low level that is assigned to an average salesperson in those people's minds, you know, whether or not that's correct, to something like, oh, he was a developer or he was a product manager. I'm more willing to listen to what he has to say at this point, and only then do I try to see if my product might be interesting to them.

59:49 Scott Ingram: And do you find that particular channels work, work better? I mean, you talked about the phone is, is a super challenging channel. Are… do you find others that work better?

59:59 Matt Du Pont: Yeah, I think LinkedIn is actually pretty good for the Bay Area. I think generally, like, they're gonna be… some fraction of developers really don't use LinkedIn, but for those I think it's more common here. That's just sort of where you're… that's like sort of your resume. And so I think a decent amount are highly engaged there. And so outreach on that channel can work. Cold email, I think, can still work, but I have my current hypothesis, but I haven't proven anything that's done really, really good. I try to write it kind of more long-form, story-based, more of the things that you'd traditionally see when you're subscribing to you know, when you put your email in for some sort of informational product and they send you long stories, I try to do that just to differentiate from all the short emails using the usual BDR tactics. But so LinkedIn, LinkedIn, definitely number one channel. Events, I think, is really big for me right now, but I think it'll be challenging once I have a child to, you know, be going to that stuff in the evening. And then in all cases, the most important thing just being showing I understand their problem at a level of depth higher than most of what they're receiving. So sort of like I sent you, I'll probably be inclined to send longer emails where some people are just gonna look at that and be like, I'm not gonna read that. But for some fraction of people that do read that, they find the content much more interesting than average. But I have not cracked this. I don't wanna like say like, here's the way to do it, it's great. Like, I'm struggling with this. I've mostly done my deals off of inbound expansion and cross-sell so far.

1:01:33 Scott Ingram: Sure. Well, and that's why I think the Your email to me as an example is such a good example, right? Because it, it was, you, you really opened with like, here are the things that I know that you care about and you nailed it. So just that, that to your point, much deeper understanding of what people are wanting in the communication or, or just to solve for. And, and then there was kind of the, the long form, but you hooked me on the beginning and I couldn't help but to read through the rest of it. And then, and then immediately replied, like it was, it was game on from From that point. So I, I, I can see how that works because it worked for me. So I think that'll, that'll be a great resource to, to share. So let's go back to your checklist. I, I interrupted you as, as you were walking us through kind of the, the pre-call checklist process and just making sure that anytime that you do have a meeting that's a really important opportunity and you don't want to, you want to make the most of it.

1:02:27 Matt Du Pont: Sure, sure. So I'd say there's a couple different areas where I I just, I have this tool, TextExpander. I'm sure lots of people use lots of different tools for essentially put in a few keystrokes and it drops a bunch of content in. But that, I don't know how I, I don't know how I'd kind of get by without that because it's really nice to just be able to be in a document and drop in the, drop in this list. A lot of it is around making sure I hit the really fundamental stuff on a call. So as I'm prepping, I want to make sure I'm writing out what are the clear goals I have for the call and making myself commit those to writing. And then for each person that's going to be on the call, I want to have a clear idea, you know, where are they at with LaunchDarkly and with feature flagging? So are they someone who's super advanced and I need to be talking to them with a lot of deference around feature flagging, or do they not even know what this is? And a lot of my most challenging calls are when I have both of those people on the… people with both of those on the phone. I want to know what's the priority level of trying to turn that person into a champion or coach, if any. And I like to know for each person, kind of pulling from Neil Stephenson, my favorite… oh, sorry, not Neil Stephenson, Neil Rackham, I believe, Spin Selling. He wrote another book, Major Account Sales, but I found it really helpful to just… is this person in the phase where they're kind of recognizing their needs Are they evaluating their option or have they kind of chosen us and they're resolving their concerns? And again, that can be different for different people on the call. And it's just really important for me to have in my head where I think the people are at, because that influences how they talk to each other and how I talk to them. Then, you know, during the call, I want to make sure I have some sort of hook prepared for the intro. So, you know, whether that's we're from the same place, we have a sports team in common, just something I'm going to open up with if nothing else presents itself. Making sure the logistics are in place. So I've, you know, is everything happy from an AV perspective before I jump into it? And then sharing the agenda. And then after the call, I want to make sure that I'm immediately doing some sort of information capture on what do I still need to learn and what do I follow up with? I'm always so tempted after these calls to run off to my next meeting or just like, okay, that was a long time. Let's do something else now, let's eat lunch. And I really try to make myself sit there and like record an audio note or write it down while my thoughts are still fresh, both what information we need to capture and then what do I think the next account plan should be. So where are we at on this deal? What are my biggest gaps in the knowledge? And in sort of the SPIN Selling criteria, was this a successful advance? Like, did I meet someone else or advance the deal? Or is it a continuation where, you know, I might say I learned something But I didn't open up any new connections and my connections didn't commit to anything concrete that's further. And that really tells me if that call was a failure or success.

1:05:20 Scott Ingram: So I want to interrupt mostly just to bookmark this for myself, because I think that in the moment, what I will often, too often do, I take pretty good notes during calls, but that process of spending just a couple of minutes to debrief with yourself, capture some key points, make sure that you've nailed the steps and all of those kinds of things. Because in the moment, I always feel like, oh, I won't forget that. And the next day I've forgotten. Like, it's like, man, have you not figured yourself out yet? So I love that you're just taking that pause and taking that opportunity and in whatever method makes the most sense, like capture those key points in the moment because it's never going to be fresh again and you're going to forget stuff because you're going to have like how many other calls and how many other meetings and how many other emails between now and the next time you're going to you're going to act on it. So anyway, I, I don't mean to interrupt, but that was important for me.

1:06:11 Matt Du Pont: Yeah, yeah. And like, I want to emphasize that like a lot of this stuff makes me sound kind of like a machine, but I don't always follow these systems. And this one in particular, I have a real… I, I bat like, you know, I bat .500 on this on a good day. It's one thing I'm really trying to fix because it's always like, right now, you know, when I'm sitting back thinking about the process, of course you want to do that. But in the moment, it's always like, well, I really need to prep this next meeting. Well, I really need to do this email. Like I make a lot of excuses around that. And so I think if I did this all the time, I'd be in a better position, but I'm only doing it about a third to half the time right now. And I think that, you know, that's fine in the moment, but then I come back, you know, maybe they don't take the next meeting for like 2 weeks or so if it was some complex deliverables in between. And then it's like, I really wish I knew a little bit more about where this person was when I'm prepping it next time.

1:07:03 Scott Ingram: Yep. Yep. Awesome. All right. Keep going.

1:07:05 Matt Du Pont: So those are the 3 main elements of after the call. It's like the information capture, making the next account plan, and then assessing, was that a successful call? What should I change? And I like to evaluate if I'm using implication and need-payoff questions enough, which are kind of 2 things from the SPIN framework, which I follow in as much as I guess I like follow a sales framework that's been the most influential to me. And then I'll just have an area to take notes and pull in the follow-ups. And the notes are important to me because for our sales cycle, I'm gonna be talking to these companies, you know, very… at very least like 4 times probably, and often much more than that. And so I try to maintain certain lists of stuff. Ideally it would be in Salesforce, but it's mostly in Google Drive just because it's more flexible, of things like what are the list of people involved and what do I know about them, or What's the most important themes of this deal? So like every time I interact with this customer, I should read like these 3 sentences to really get that back into my mind, or what's their tech stack or things like that. So sort of having a set area of notes where I take every call and I enhance that like one-pager that I try to look at each time I'm thinking about a company in a big way. Because otherwise, just like you said, it's like, oh, I'll remember this detail, I remember that detail, but My memory is not good enough that if I'm on call 5, I'm gonna remember some detail from call 2 unless I chose that's the one detail I'm gonna pull out and put in a place where I read that, you know, before the next hour-long conversation with this client.

1:08:35 Scott Ingram: Yeah, greatness.

1:08:36 Matt Du Pont: So that's, that's mostly it for the stuff around calls. And then pretty much my day goes between doing that and following the checklist I described earlier on those high priority tasks. And those could be anything from send an email to something like schedule a session with my solutions engineer and really think for half an hour about, you know, where are we going with this client and what's best for them. So that kind of covers most of everything. And I do struggle a little bit with sometimes, you know, some of the tasks on that list take 3 minutes, some take 45. I'm naturally inclined to shy away from the harder ones and try to find an excuse not to do the long complicated stuff. So starting off my day by kind of eating the frog and doing those more difficult ones I usually have better days if I can do that, but I don't always do that.

1:09:20 Scott Ingram: Oh, so you're human.

1:09:21 Matt Du Pont: Very much so. Yeah. I wish if I follow, I'd be very, very, very good at sales if I followed all these lists. I just do my best, but I don't quite get there most of the time.

1:09:29 Scott Ingram: Yeah. I think that's a fair call-out, right? So much of this is, it is kind of in many ways a bit of a best-case scenario in that, yeah, this is generally what I aspire to and this is a good day, but you know, let's, let's not lose track of the realities of life and just everything else that comes at us. And none of us are perfect in executing this stuff.

1:09:52 Matt Du Pont: Right. And I think, I think that's really important to take into account. But I think the best, the best systems will also… like, I don't think I'm a great salesperson, but I think I'm pretty good at building systems. And I think the best systems will take into account that you're human or that you're going to miss things. And so, for example, like, I do have kind of a set of like, here's a few things to try if you just totally lose focus in the afternoon, you're wandering around or avoiding work. So solution to no process sometimes might be more process for me, but I don't know, it's a tough balance between planning out in detail, here's what a great day would look like versus it's not gonna happen that way and you need to have some flexibility. And if you do the same thing every day, I'll get super bored. So you need to have some novelty.

1:10:33 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Yeah. Walk us through just the last piece, kind of the back end of your day. So what time are you knocking off and and get back on the road to head home?

1:10:42 Matt Du Pont: So it's really, again, pretty flexible for me. Like, I determine that very much based on the day. And a lot of… one of the biggest inputs to that is just sort of who's around. So if my wife is working late and I don't have any, like, friends that are particularly free that day, then I'll go a lot later than if there's something exciting to do. I typically like to get in earlier than almost everyone and leave earlier than almost everyone. So the sort of anesthesia rotation, getting up at 5:00 AM has exaggerated that. But like, for example, on Monday I probably worked about 12 hours, which is way more than I usually like to. But then on Tuesday I worked more like 4. So I did a lot less and I'm thankful that I don't really have leadership that cares too much about butts in seats. It's more just results. So I have like a really simple closing ritual where I'll just do things like, you know, another gratitude exercise, set my goals for tomorrow, do a bunch of the prep for tomorrow so that that early checklist I outlined to you is mostly already done, and then just take some notes to my personal CRM about what I learned about my clients today. But I really try to like make my start and ending times flexible to what's going on in my life and kind of work more at times when there's not as much going on, and then use that to mean that it's very easy for me to just leave at 3 PM if my wife and I are excited about doing something, or, you know, my friends and I are going on a trip or something like that.

1:12:11 Scott Ingram: Yeah, cool. So you said personal CRM. Talk more about that. What is that?

1:12:15 Matt Du Pont: So this is an area that I've kind of been interested in for a while. I use a product called Monica. I think it's monicahq.com. It's open source. Guys have done a really good job building it. But I don't have a great memory. And so a lot of these systems are kind of helping me compensate for the fact that I don't remember things as well as some people just do. And especially because it's not so much you need like a CRM for people that you know very well as much as the kind of acquaintances, whether that's, you know, some distant like relative, someone's family you meet at a party, or just someone you meet at a meetup who isn't part of a deal cycle. But I think it's like relationships are so important and being tied to people is so important. And I don't want to bet on any platform where I don't have a good amount of control over that to persisting for the long, long run. So if I could know that LinkedIn would have a pretty similar format 30 years from now, then maybe I would do things differently. But, you know, if I just LinkedIn and LinkedIn message people, then, you know, when LinkedIn shuts down or changes something or doesn't let you export certain things, then I basically lost. Or when I leave a company, then everyone I've talked to, you know, you can't just like take the data database when you leave if they're at all tech savvy. So you kind of got to keep some notes along the way of just what your personal experiences are. And I've been doing that for about 8 or 9 years. So it's really handy for me once I kind of stumble across people I stumbled across in the past, being able to know the context in which I met them and maybe a little bit about what they cared about if it was in a more professional context. So I just, I just think it's a shame that most people, they put… you kind of have to put so much into, you know, your Rolodex sort of lives in Salesforce these days, and when you switch companies, it's gone. So I would be surprised if more people aren't using a system like that in, you know, next decade or 2.

1:14:17 Scott Ingram: Sure, sure. Are there any other habits, routines, processes that are, that are just really core to the way you operate that we haven't talked about yet?

1:14:26 Matt Du Pont: Yeah, I'd say the one thing is kind of doing a weekly… I call it a retro just from software, but just sort of a weekly self-examination because a lot of these checklists are really helpful for kind of doing really good tactically, but there's nothing in there where it's going to be strategic. You know, you're going to do really, really well at executing what you currently think is the right sale, but I'm sure I'm early enough in my career there's some stuff that I just totally haven't discovered where if I get, you know, just better… you know, it's like I'm trying to think of a good metaphor here, but, you know, I could get you know, better and better at, let's say, like, you know, making bread by hand by doing these checklists and refining them. But then maybe there's like the bread machine out there and there's a way that I can do everything a lot faster or just like totally shake things up. And the weakness to all these tactical checklists is that you don't explore big new ideas. And so this weekly thing is sort of very different than what I've been doing. It's not as much follow these exact steps as much as just a set of questions and feedback that I've heard in the past that's trying to challenge me to think about a bit bigger picture stuff so that maybe I try some crazy new idea or I think about something totally different than what I'm doing the other 4 and a half days of the week.

1:15:53 Scott Ingram: Yeah. So it's probably wrong that I waited this long to ask this question because I've been wondering this all along and I'm sure that my audience is losing their mind going, Scott, come on. And that is, so, so first, how are you doing this detailed time tracking? And with that, like, well, why don't we start with like, what are, what are the biggest insights and ahas that have just come out of having that level of detail for yourself? Like, what if, what are you, what are you learning? What are the big themes that you, that you've seen? Sure.

1:16:24 Matt Du Pont: So I use a product called Airtable, which is sort of like if a if Microsoft Excel and like a database had a child, it would be, it would be this. It's nice because it makes it really easy to link things across tables. So what I mean by that is that I might have, I have in this a list of all the companies I might call on, and I have in this a list of all the actions I might take relative to those companies. So maybe it could be I'm going to be coordinating with my SDR, or I'm going to be like onboarding that client, or I'm going to be replying to an email, or, you know, there's this… the list goes on. But in all those cases, it makes it really easy to say, here are the different lists and let's pull together what you're doing at what time. So the entry would just be like, what company is it? It then automatically says what time I started. I would put one or more tags of like, what's the action? So like, am I navigating internal red tape? Am I doing, you know, am I in a sales team meeting or something? And then I attach some tags to it sometimes of like, if there's anything notable about how I felt. So did this, was I really annoyed? Did it feel really good? Did I learn something? And recently I've also started writing out like a short little note for each one. And the goal with all this is that when I get to the end of a deal, whether that's a closed one or a closed lost, I can then just sort by the company I'm targeting. And instead of having this vague idea that, oh, I spent a lot of time with this company, I have a list of like, what actions did I take at what time and what came out of that? And that allows me to do things like say, oh, well, you know, maybe I won this deal, but could I have cut out a bunch of steps here? Or if I had gone in a different direction here, maybe I'd win both ways, but I'd have a much stronger executive relationship to set me up for a future expansion. Or something like that. So that's a little bit about the kind of just general parameters of how I keep the tool. It's like a list of events attached to companies. And any questions on that before I get a bit into what I've learned from it?

1:18:34 Scott Ingram: I'm just wondering if, if somebody wants to try and take this on, is it possible to create just sort of an empty template based on some of this stuff in Airtable that we could share with other folks? Because I'm imagining you're having to kind of like set all this up, right?

1:18:48 Matt Du Pont: Yeah, I genuinely don't know. That would certainly be a high amount of effort. So I think it's not something I'd probably do right this moment, but I think like, I'm happy to share kind of a screenshot and give the rough parameters. Honestly, I think you should probably just start in Excel and like with all these systems, like it doesn't usually make sense to start the car in 4th gear. So if you aren't time tracking at all and you go to something like this intense, it's probably not going to be a habit that sticks with you very well. And so it might be easier to start with, oh, on these 3 deals, I'm just going to write down in Excel, like, you know, when I spend time on them. And then if I do that, I find… I think it's kind of useful and I get some cool insights, then maybe I'll expand to a bigger system. And then maybe I'll do this whole Airtable thing. Because I certainly didn't start like this. And if I did start like this, I don't think it would've stuck. It's more just, this is like the 7th or 8th version of something that I did over the course of a few years.

1:19:50 Scott Ingram: Gotcha. Gotcha. And I, I know Brandon Fluharty also mentioned a, a time tracking tool that, that he's using. So there's, there's other tools out there. So whether, whether it's Excel, I, I, I love the don't start in 4th gear analogy. So yeah, once you progress to a certain level, then you can reach out to Matt and we'll figure this out. But good, good stuff. I'll let you, I'll let you keep going.

1:20:07 Matt Du Pont: Yeah. Yeah. It's just, it'd be really hard to like de-anonymize. So that, that's, that's kind of the tough part. But I think, like I alluded to earlier, I think that one of the core things is just really being able to look back and see what your day was. I think there are, like, I can't really speak to what other people do as much, but I think this is my experience and it'd be common to other people that we're not always mentally honest with ourselves on how we actually spend our time. We might think, oh, that was a really hard day. And you look back, it's like, wow, that was 3 and a half hours of like meetings and internal conversations. And I only had a couple hours of client-facing stuff. Or if I look at the value of the deals I spent time on today, it's clear that I did a lot of things that were urgent at the top of my inbox, and I didn't create time to work on the deal that's 10 times larger, but that isn't calling me right now. So the number one thing I think you get out of this, even if your system isn't fancy at all, is just having to admit to yourself how much you actually work and what you put that work into, which is to me, a really important early step in all the stuff we've talked about earlier and, you know, working less days or how you somehow, which I still don't understand, balance your quota and all these podcasts and things like that. I think some of the other insights that have come out of it are there's just certain customizing certain things doesn't really make too much sense. Like there's certain conversational paths I can go down where you try to like do right by a client by doing certain types of custom training or setting up your product a certain way. And it… you can see that like some of those tend to just eat up a ton of time. So it tells you a little bit about what sorts of deals might consume a lot of time and not go very well. I think it also really helps to get insight on things like internal meetings or like how even if you just… if you made yourself like make a tick mark every time you looked at your company's instant messenger, I've had days where you do that and it's like, wow, I, I looked at Slack like 30 or 40 times. I wonder if I can just do that 10 times. And then the world doesn't explode and you get… and you kind of… you're a lot less distracted and switching a lot less. I think a final thing that comes to mind is seeing kind of how many minutes you spend on things. And if you have a day where you're spending a lot of time, like 3 minutes, 5 minutes, 8 minutes, you know, really short periods, then that's kind of telling you you didn't think in a lot of depth about certain things. And I found that a lot of my days look best when there's big blocks up front where I kind of use my… I have… I happen to be best in the morning, and I use my like best version of myself on like hard tasks that are difficult to grapple with. And then I close out the afternoon by doing all those like little follow-ups and all those things where you bounce around between 20 different accounts, but you're not spending a ton of time thinking about each one.

1:22:54 Scott Ingram: Nice. So I want to… how long does this take? Right? Like, I guess the question is like, well, first, how long does it take? And is it, is it really worth it? Yeah.

1:23:02 Matt Du Pont: So I think like, this is coming a lot from my product manager background, where like a lot of what you're doing as a PM is making sure that your, your company sort of builds the right software. And so I think, you know, putting in an entry when you start and end things doesn't take too much time. Maybe it slows me down by like, 2 or 3% or something. I haven't exactly mapped it out, but I have a strong conviction, which is not backed by evidence, but just kind of how I feel, that by far the worst thing I could do is spend time in a wasteful way. So if this… if, if all this work means that I have one deal where I was going to spend 40 hours on it and I was going to be in second place for predictable reasons, and, you know, not get the business. And instead, I can see that this deal has the same shape as 4 or 5 other deals that didn't go as well, and I can DQ that after 5 hours. Like, that's where the time comes from. It's just finding the sorts of deals where you make a low amount of commissionable dollars per unit time, or you could have DQ'd them earlier, and just not making really big mistakes with your time. And you'll probably never know they were mistakes. You'll be like, oh, that was so close on that deal, or something like that. But To me, it's like trading a little bit of time every day to avoid really big potholes down the line.

1:24:22 Scott Ingram: That's a really interesting way to look at it because the other way I was thinking about it was really just sort of a self-accountability thing, right? If you're going to track your time to that level of granularity, like, do I really want to write in here that I was farting around on who knows what website for 35 minutes in the middle of Like my peak productive time. Like that was really freaking stupid.

1:24:44 Matt Du Pont: Yeah. And it makes… there's a lot of like, you feel that way a lot at first. And then I find I just do that less and less, which is just nice. So like I found it's a really good accountability mechanism. Like I'll just make… when I go to my like one-on-ones with my manager, I'll just bring a chart once a month of like, here's for the last 30 days, like here's the tasks here's the accounts I've spent time on sorted by where the, where the most time is. And just having that conversation around like, which of these accounts are taking up a lot of time overall? And like, are those the accounts we're really excited about in the future? Or, you know, if not, like, why are they this high on this list? And what can we do differently? Like, bringing that accountability not just to yourself, but having other people kind of look at the aggregate numbers once in a while has been really helpful to me because You know, so much… I feel like I'm guilty of this in this conversation, especially because a lot of things I've learned are like particular to, you know, our sale in a way that, you know, not every sale is the same steps and it'd be hard to like show that impact. But general sales advice has like limited application. But using this to let your manager get into a conversation with you about specifics, like let them kind of see enough about your day, they can actually give you useful advice instead of a general like platitude or motivational speech has really helped me get more out of my relationship with my boss.

1:26:06 Scott Ingram: Yeah, talk more about that. Like, what, what is… and, and I, I imagine you've, you've had several different bosses over the course of, of doing this level of, of tracking. Like, what's, what's been their reaction to this, and, and how does that change the relationship?

1:26:19 Matt Du Pont: Well, I think it's one of those things where, for all of my first boss, this has been a core part of my personal brand as a salesperson. I present very aggressively on this from the beginning of interviewing because my, like, if I've only, I've only been doing this for 3 years now and I've only been at this company for about a year. And so if you just went by raw seniority in terms of let's just look at how many years this guy's been in sales, then it wouldn't really make sense to hire me for the roles that I want because you'd want me to put more time in kind of a bit lower on the ladder, if you will. And so I think this is usually, instead of me just saying that, hey, I'm really systematic, I'm gonna think about your sale in a way that's pretty rigorous, I'm able to show, hey, I've been doing this for quite some time. I'm a bit different than some of the candidates you're interviewing right now. Like you might wanna take a hard look at me. And I think, so my bosses have kind of known about it from the beginning, but it's been a huge differentiator on the job market. Because it really reframes the conversation right away and, you know, makes it about systems and makes it about how you think about things kind of in an abstract way, which is really good for, for me.

1:27:29 Scott Ingram: And it's definitely a differentiator as a podcast guest because nobody sent me freaking charts and graphs about their levels of productivity. It's pretty awesome.

1:27:36 Matt Du Pont: Yeah, but I think it's also like, it's easy to… it's easy for me to like overemphasize this stuff. And I think one thing that really doesn't come across in this particular conversation is that, you know, this is great and all, but ultimately you need to be showing business value, you need to be really empathetic and things like that. And those don't measure very nicely on charts, at least charts that I can make. So this controls a certain part of the universe, but there's still a lot of fundamental sales skills that this doesn't really help me practice, that I still need to work a lot on and make sure I don't try to reduce everything to a number.

1:28:07 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Well, and it sounded like, as you were talking earlier, you're trying to pick up some of those things in your retro as you're looking back at the week. Before and looking for kind of like, what's the softer stuff that I'm missing through my super hard data-driven approach here?

1:28:22 Matt Du Pont: Yeah, yeah. And you definitely need to like kind of approach this with a very different personality than the one you show your clients because you need to be really curious and empathetic and stuff. So I think you can't be thinking about… that's the nice thing about the checklist, they sort of take the choice out of the matter. So you're not like thinking about all its efficiency sometimes. Like sometimes you're doing this sort of city planning view of your your sales, but by doing that at different times, then when I'm in the middle of the day, I can just focus on the client and the person. And I know that I'm just kind of passively collecting data. That means later on I'll be able to retool things, but I don't have to worry moment to moment about what's important to do next.

1:28:56 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Love it. Love it.

1:28:57 Matt Du Pont: Love it.

1:28:58 Scott Ingram: So what does your information diet look like? Right. I mean, obviously you're a super smart, intelligent guy, right? What, what are you reading, listening to and watching? And when does that stuff happen and how do you incorporate the learnings?

1:29:11 Matt Du Pont: Sure. So I'm not super proud of my answer for this. Point. I think, I think I'm not really taking in enough information at this point. So I think there's like a couple… I've been definitely most influenced by, by books in sales. We can get in a little bit into like which ones have been interesting there if you'd like in the future. I pretty much only listen to this podcast in terms of sales stuff. I think there's a lot of podcasts for leaders, but a lot of it seems to be people telling like general stories and or just stuff about how to organize larger sales teams. And maybe I just haven't explored enough, but this is really the only podcast I found that really helps me as an individual contributor that doesn't aspire to manage salespeople. So thank you for that. I appreciate it. And I'll do that mostly when I'm exercising, but I don't really… I try to avoid most news. I was really, really into that stuff for a while. Like I said, I wanted to be a lobbyist, so I was very into politics, but I think if I'm not really able to do too much about it. It's kind of a distraction. So I get distracted by plenty of things, but that's not one area I go into. And a lot of my information diet is really around just what I think my clients are reading. So the site that I go to reflexively when I'm bored or in the bathroom is Hacker News, which is kind of a Reddit for… slightly more polite Reddit, I guess, for developers and startups in Silicon Valley. And then I'll read a number of developer newsletters, but I think most of my career is going to be successful in sales based on knowing this buyer really well, more than having the absolute best sales skills. So I'm trying to really focus on maintaining some sort of relevance in my developer PM self, which is harder and harder the longer I go without actually having held those roles.

1:30:57 Scott Ingram: Yeah, that's super interesting. It's interesting you say that. I mean, I think that one thing that I have noticed in so many of these conversations, and maybe it's just because I interrogate people to death, but I feel like, I feel like it's that top producers, right, who… and there's certainly a consistent theme around this. This is a craft. This is something that you develop over, over years and decades. They have a much higher degree of self-awareness. And I think what you're doing, I mean, you're, you're learning from yourself. Which is way the hell more relevant than any sort of random bit of stuff that you get out there. And I asked, I had a conversation with Scott Leese just this last Friday afternoon. We did sort of, I tried a different approach, second time I've tried it, where we did sort of a series. I just asked him a whole bunch of questions that I'll chop up into Daily Sales Tips over the course of this year. And one of the questions I asked him was about what he saw, because he's predominantly been in sales leadership roles. I asked him what he saw in the top performers that he'd work with as kind of the consistent things in And he said, you know what, they typically just have a really tight process and they don't deviate from that process. There's not a lot of tweaking and experimenting. It's just kind of heads down, go execute, right? So I think that there is, you've got to sort of find that balance. And I'm getting to this point where, man, more information and great ideas is great, but at a certain point, it's like, this is too much, right? So I think you have to, at some level, control some of those inputs. I think I think shutting off news as an input is a pretty smart move because there's, there's nothing good or helpful that really comes out of it. It's just stuff that pisses you off. And, and, and really just focusing on, again, like yourself and to your point, the what's important to your clients, right? I think the more that you can know about that, about your, your customers and their world, that's going to serve you really, really well. So let's, let's pivot to tools and apps. What besides Airtable and your CRM and other things that you've talked about so far, what's, what's kind of core to your process from a, from a kind of personal technology stack perspective?

1:33:08 Matt Du Pont: Sure, sure. So yeah, I think, I think those 2 things are definitely pretty important. Another piece is some sort of call recording software like Chorus or Gong. So I think we may see for for a lot of sales roles, a big skill gap develop for people that have those tools and people that don't. I don't think that I've seen too many tools… like, they're trying to do a lot of fancy stuff with analytics at both companies, and I'm not sure how useful that is yet. But even just the notion that you get your, your calls are recorded, you can see them, and you can see what other people did, and there's some sort of searchable transcript that's at least accurate enough that you can put in a word like a specific competitor or, you know, price or negotiate, like some, some keyword and kind of find the right area of the conversation. That's been really important to me getting better. And so I think at this point I would not work for a company that does not have like Gong or Chorus or something similar installed, because I think it basically just would be very damaging to me like several years in the future. To not be getting better that way. TextExpander, which I mentioned earlier, it's a way of… it's just kind of always running on your computer and means if you hit an obscure series of keys, it plugs stuff in and just makes everything faster and not have to think about it. So for example, if you ever type your own name or your email on a computer, like, you might want to be doing that in like 3 keystrokes. Or if you have certain links that you include in most emails or things like that, I would I've just found it like maybe your personal Zoom link or some case studies you usually send out, having the right like 50 or 100 most common things you write in some sort of template form or just the sentence itself in a tool like this means that you can kind of type at the speed of thought a little bit more. And instead of, you know, your brain thinks something and then you take a while to write it out in an email, hopefully you're just using your like higher thought functions most of the time. Like, what does this customer want to see? Instead of I know what they want and now I'm spending a long time putting it on paper. So like, I think using like snippets of various sizes has saved me a lot of time. Like I'll write out for any integration my company has, I'll write out like 1 or 2 sentences on why that might be interesting. And then I just copy paste that instead of rewriting it over and over. And then there's a tool called Freedom, which has been really important to me. What that does is it lets you it shuts down your ability to see certain websites at certain times. So I, you know, especially when I'm working from home, I'll kind of reflexively want to procrastinate if I get overloaded, and I'll want to go to YouTube or Hacker News or Reddit. And you can set up block lists on this so that it kind of locks your computer down and you can't go to those sites during certain times. And I find that very useful to have running on the weekday hours when I usually want to work, as well as like past a certain time of night, I probably shouldn't just be staying up watching stuff. And this kind of, instead of having to have willpower about that, it just sort of happens to me, which I really like.

1:36:15 Scott Ingram: That's awesome. So, and I happen to know that that site, I haven't used it, but I've looked at it a couple of times. It's freedom.to, T-O. And yeah, it was something that I included in my list of resources that, you know, just things that may be worth experimenting with as you're developing your own productivity processes that I presented at the summit. So fascinating. Cool.

1:36:35 Matt Du Pont: Yeah, yeah. And the one other thing, this is like the least technical of all, is that I have these big yellow noise-canceling headphones that look absolutely ridiculous. So these aren't like the, like, several hundred dollar electronic cancelers. This is the stuff you put on when you're like target shooting or chopping down a tree, where they're just giant obnoxious 3M ear protectors. And I found that these are really helpful, not just for hearing less in the office, but also because it's this bright commercial from like across the room that like, hey, maybe Matt doesn't want to talk to people right now. And so for my big… like, I don't wear them all day or anything because I want to like, you know, be pleasant to my colleagues and stuff. But for the big times I really need to focus, I'll put that on and I'll sort of try to train people not to interact with me very much while those… while I'm wearing those. And that's been really good, just a public signal. To not roll up to my desk and get me involved in a non-urgent conversation when I'm doing the most complicated thing in my day and it takes me 20 minutes to get started and then I have to go for an hour.

1:37:37 Scott Ingram: Well, and I think because I've experimented with similar things, not that, and I also work from home, so I don't need the signal piece so much, but I've played with a software or a website, I suppose, called brain.fm that its promise is silly. It uses AI to make music that's super productive for you, whatever. For me, it's more about like triggering a zone and like triggering a state, right? So when you put on big-ass, you know, yellow headphones, this not only signals to other people but signals to yourself, all right, man, time to freaking focus, right?

1:38:11 Matt Du Pont: Yeah, I think that's super… that notion of habits is really important. Like, one of the things I'm working on most in my life right now is building some cornerstone habits. So like, when I get back from work, I'm trying to just do like a really, really funny, like, like a hilariously low number of push-ups. Or I'm gonna try and spend like a few minutes thinking about like my personal time before I go to lunch. And the goal of these is that, that these, that those particular habits are worth anything as much as if I can get myself to do certain things every day where it basically boils down to with a certain stimulus, I follow a checklist, then that lets me really easily change my behavior later 'Cause I can hook that onto the existing cornerstone habit. And the main reason I'm doing this is 'cause I feel like when we have this kid in 2 months, which I'm very excited for, I'm gonna be super sleep deprived and probably be a lot more grumpy and I'm gonna start not following a lot of my routines. So I just wanna have these really set things in place, just like you described with, you know, brain.fm to kind of prompt you to get to a certain state so that I can attach whatever new habits I need, whether that's like something around diapers or just something around taking a minute to breathe. I already have those habits kind of installed in myself so that I'm ready for whatever comes. And then there's also Monica, the personal CRM I referenced earlier, which just makes me feel a lot more comfortable when I do something like go to an event where maybe I meet 1 or 2 prospects, but then, you know, maybe I meet 8 or 9 people that are just in the broader San Francisco tech community that I might stumble across in the future, but don't need to interact with in sales right now. Kind of file that away for, for the future.

1:39:44 Scott Ingram: Brilliant. Brilliant. So I'm looking at the clock here and as, as big a fan as I am of these super deep, super long interviews, we're getting really dang close to the 2-hour mark. And that's, we're already past the time that we scheduled for the interview because some of our additional conversation. Here's what I want to do. And I feel like this, this type of episode is going to be super fascinating for a certain type of sales professional and sort of the uber sales nerds, guys like probably Matt and I, who we could keep geeking out on this for another 2 hours without any trouble at all. But it's probably not super relevant for everybody. I would imagine that the, the rest of the everybody, they probably dropped off long ago. So I'm probably only speaking to, to my, my uber sales nerd people. Who are absolutely loving this, this conversation. And I'm gonna suggest that we do the, the following. So first off, if this is really resonating with you and, and if this is, cuz this, this feels to me like this, this is sales content that, and partially because you're a super unique guy, Matt, and, and the way that you are approaching this is not normal, right? Most salespeople are not wired to do this, this degree of, of tracking and, and self-analysis and, and everything else. So I, I don't know that there will be a very many other people that go to the same lengths. However, I do feel that regardless, your insights and what you're learning is really, really fascinating. So, first of all, you're already registered for the 2020 Sales Success Summit. I am highly inclined… this is always based on feedback and the broader themes that we're trying to bring together in that experience… but I'm highly inclined to put Matt on stage at that event and allow him to really peel the onion on one or more kind of particular pieces that are going to be the most relevant and the most compelling at the summit. So I appreciate you being there and being willing to do that. We'll start to build that agenda probably about the latter part of Q2. So I always love if you're on the listener list, which again, if you're at this point in the episode and you're not getting an email a week from me and on the listener list, man, What is wrong with you? You can get that at top1.fm where you're also going to find the show notes for this. Hit a reply to one of those emails and just let me know what you think about this. Your feedback is super valuable, super important. And in addition to putting Matt on the stage, we just had a quick little sidebar conversation. I probably have 15 normal questions left that I haven't even asked yet. So, I'm inclined to make good. On my threat to bring Matt back on the show maybe a year, a year and a half after he brings his kiddo into the world to talk about what he's learned in that interim period of time. And we can get to the rest of the questions, but, but also just talk about the realities of as a, as a father in sales, which, which many of us are parents in sales. It's definitely a challenging time to do that when you're, when your kids are particularly young. So I'm really interested in your insights on that. So with, with all that, why don't we wrap up like we always do with an actionable challenge? Obviously we've covered tons and tons and tons of ground. There's tons of things that, that people could try out based on, on this conversation. And there's, there's going to be even more in the show notes. Matt's gonna be sending me a li… a list of, a shortlist actually, of some of the most impactful sales books he's read and things of that nature. So that'll all be for you, be there for you again, top1.fm/matt-du-pont or /the episode number. Matt, what, what would you challenge the person listening to this right now to do to improve themselves and improve their results over the course of the next 2 weeks?

1:43:43 Matt Du Pont: Yeah, thanks a lot, Scott. I really appreciate the kind words and I'm definitely looking forward to the summit and meeting some of the other folks that I've been listening to and watching this and participating in this podcast. I have lots and lots of questions, so I'm really excited. I would say in terms of the challenge, it's a bit of a commitment for 2 weeks. So maybe I'll say try this for a day or 2, even just 1 day. Maybe try just tracking your time, you know, make an Excel sheet. What client are you doing? What time do you start? What time do you stop? And what'd you do? And just spend… just do that for 1 day. And then at the end, like, maybe, maybe, you know, go sleep on it. And then the next morning, just look back and kind of ask yourself 2 things. Like, one, did I work significantly harder or better because I was being this honest with myself? And 2, is there anything I did yesterday that maybe didn't make a lot of sense and is indicative of some sort of habit I want to change? So you don't have to sign up for the whole track forever rigmarole. I know most people are not going to be interested in that, and that's totally fine. But even doing this sort of checkup every once in a while can be really, really interesting. And what it brings up about how you spend your day that you might just not know about yourself right now.

1:44:55 Scott Ingram: Greatness. I'm going to try that. And I just pulled up the notes from Brandon's episode because the tool that he had mentioned was Timeular. So there are tools to help with this. It doesn't necessarily have to be Excel because I imagine that just some of the very manual entries, it might be easier to, hey, starting right now, keep track of what I'm doing and then I'll close that entry and start the next one. So I'm sure there's some tools like Timeular That you can use to help accelerate that process. I think we're all going to learn some fascinating things about ourselves through that process. Matt, this has been really incredible. I appreciate all of your time, not just in this interview, all of the prep that you did, all of the resources that you've been so open and willing to share with us that we'll have at top1.fm. And then, man, can't wait to meet you in person in Austin here in October. And for those who would like to join us, you'll find all of those details and the opportunity to register Register at top1summit.com. Thanks, Matt.

1:45:55 Matt Du Pont: Thank you so much, Scott. Thanks for listening to the Sales Success Stories podcast.

1:46:01 Scott Ingram: To be sure you never miss an episode and for an invitation to our Sales Success Community powered by Influitive, subscribe to our newsletter at top1.fm.